Are thumbdrives going floppy?

Much as I like the design of the Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go Clip-it USB Drive, I’m not going to buy one. In the past I would have snapped one of these up. I almost did a post last month when I saw the device had won the Red Dot ‘Best of the Best’ 2010 award saying we should all rush out and buy one. But I didn’t. I sat back and realised that I used a thumbdrive about once per month these days (at best). In fact the only thing I have really used one for at all of late is installing Windows 7 on one of my laptops as I have a 4GB Kingston thumbdrive setup as bootable for the install which takes <30 mins. Apart from that, I just don’t use ‘em.

Why? You know answer I suspect….the cloud. With services like our own Live Mesh or DropBox I just can’t be bothered fishing out a drive. I’m more likely to post to my 5gb of cloud storage with Mesh to move my files around my own machine. If I’m sharing with others, I use SkyDrive’s 25gb of free storage.

Beyond that, I have a 1TB backup device on my desk and the combination of these meets all of my needs.

So as much as I love the design of the Store ‘n’ Go, I fear this and other thumbdrives are going the way of the floppy disk…in to extinction.